Introductions

My data journey

Course goals

Syllabus

What is data?

Brainstorm: how might you use data if you were…

• …a librarian?
• …a police officer?
• …a small shoe store owner?
• …a general manager of a professional basketball franchise?

Policing

Retail

Sports

Data science

Science and business: StitchFix

• StitchFix; The Most Colorful State

What you will learn in this course

This course covers the process of exploratory data analysis, which includes how to:

• Find data
• Load data
• Clean data
• Summarize data
• Visualize data
• Present data
• Example question: what are the most popular female baby names in Texas, and how has this changed over time?

Finding data

Loading and cleaning data

Summarizing data

Visualizing data

Presenting data

Tools of the trade

• Your main tool: the Python programming language
• Guest appearances from CARTO and Tableau
• More to come on Python next week!

SageMathCloud

• SageMathCloud (http://cloud.sagemath.com): our course learning management system and Python interface
• Let’s explore…

Assignment 1: Data journalism

• Data journalism: movement in journalism toward interactive, data-driven content
• Popular publications: The Upshot (New York Times), FiveThirtyEight, The Guardian, ProPublica, many more

Your task:

• Find an example of data journalism from the past two years in a recognized publication
• Write a response that 1) summarizes the article, 2) discusses its data sources, and 3) discusses its methods of analysis and visualization.
  
• At least one paragraph, no longer than one page